Sacred Mountain Everest

Sacred Mountain Everest, by Christine Taylor-Butler (Lee & Low)

This is a long-overdue Cybils review, but let's start with the important question: how did I not know that Edmund Hillary was a beekeeper until I read this book?

Sacred Mountain Everest is a very cool book, covering some of the familiar history while giving full credit to the Sherpas who made the climbs alongside the famous names.

Seeing the author tweet this, six months after I read the book? Also very cool:

Fortuitous Reading

Okay, there are a lot of reasons why I haven't stopped talking about The Hive over the past few days. It's a great overview of how bees show up in human culture, and you don't need more than a passing interest in apiculture to find it intriguing that people have been able to draw just about any metaphor for sexual politics from the beehive, right? Or why people stopped drinking mead a long time ago?

Come on, it's not just me.

But beyond all the great cultural trivia in The Hive, I love that it connects to so many other books I'm familiar with - two of them in particular.

Bee Wilson - and yes, she notes the irony of her name and choice of topic - spends some time on the amazing work done by Francois Huber and Francois Burnens. Huber was blind and Burnens was a peasant who lucked into some education, but between the two of them they turned out some pretty impressive observations on things like the queen's nuptial flight. And they were the subject of Sara George's The Beekeeper's Pupil, which I picked up back in college.

And if I hadn't already been half in love with The Hive, this bit from the last chapter would have done it:

Like everything else about Holmes's life, his elderly vocation as beekeeper has attracted keen debate... Where in the Sussex Downs did Holmes base his apiary? When was he there? Could he have joined forces with a young female apprentice to fight crime in the area?

Is that a namecheck of Mary Russell? Very nearly. Am I looking forward to reading The Language of Bees a second time before its official release date (and then seeing the author in Westport next weekend)? Oh, yes.

Harvest Day

Sunday was harvest day - or extraction day, to use the technical term. (Also "robbing the bees day", the term I prefer.)

The actual robbery happened in August, when Mom removed the honey supers from her hives. I'm still not an expert on beehive architecture, but I'll do my best - supers are extra levels added to the hive where bees deposit comb and honey after they've filled the main part of the hive - so removing those frames left the hive with enough honey to get it through the winter. (The females, anyway.)

We had about two dozen frames to work with. The process is pretty simple, in theory. Using a hot knife, you slice off the top of the honeycomb (vocabulary word: uncapping). After you've uncapped both sides of a frame, you drop it into the extractor, and then do the same for a second frame. Then, assuming you haven't acquired an electric extractor, you turn the crank, spinning the honey out of the comb. After a few minutes, you flip the frames and crank some more, spinning the honey out of both sides of the frame.

In theory.

But theory overlooks a few things. Among them:
1) Determined wax moths will find their way into a securely closed plastic box.
2) An extractor that's been used for many years, and by many classes at New Pond Farm, will not be perfectly round. Not surprisingly, this makes the spinning part difficult.
3) When the door is open because it's a surprisingly warm October day, it won't take long for winged visitors to show up.

Until you leave the kitchen and come back, you don't realize just how strong the smell of honey is. But the local wasps and yellow jackets (exact species unknown, but they definitely weren't bees) had no trouble following the scent. We had a small horde buzzing at the screen door for most of the time we were extracting, hoping to play Ali Baba to our forty thieves.

For the most part, the unwanted guests stayed outside, despite Cassie's inability to stay on one side of the door for more than a few minutes. She, of course, didn't understand why we didn't just leave the screen open.

From the start, the extractor was not cooperative. Even after a round of oil was applied to the handle, it was a two-person job. Dad did most of the cranking, while I held the lids on and kept the thing from sliding across the floor. And then we stopped and poured in some more oil, and started again.

It was a slow process at first, but there was honey!

Honey is heavy. It sounds obvious, but you don't realize what that means until you pick up a frame after extracting the honey and feel how light it is, compared to five minutes earlier. Or when you look at a bucket with a few inches of honey in the bottom, and then find out it weighs more than twenty pounds.

Most of the honey we got came from the frames that had been stored in the first box. We took a quick break for lunch before opening the second box - which meant that all the oil we'd poured into the hand crank finally had a chance to do its work. For the second round of frames, extracting became a one-person job.

Which allowed Mom to devote her attention to yelling at the moths that had moved into the second box. They had made their presence known, so a lot of the comb had to be discarded. But there was some honey, substantially darker than what we extracted from the first frames. (Completely due to the flowers the bees had been visiting. Next time you visit a farmer's market, compare a few jars - the difference between clover honey and goldenrod honey, for example, is amazing.)

After the honey came out of the extractor, it had to be strained. Spinning frames of honeycomb does have the tendency to fling off little pieces of the comb along with the honey, and although beeswax makes lovely candles, it's not really for eating. In the picture to the right, freshly extracted honey is draining through a sieve. There were actually two, so that the finer mesh could catch wax that had made it through the first strainer.

The honey is now well-sealed, ready to be distributed in gift jars and mixed into a growing variety of recipes. The kitchen is back to normal - something I take no credit for. Mom very patiently scraped wax and drips of honey off counters, utensils, pans, and other parts of the room until she left to enjoy her belated birthday dinner.